


Jade Tunes Her Bass

by Classpectanon



Series: Three Hundred And Sixty Five Ficlets About Homestuck [24]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Music, No Dialogue, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-16 10:34:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28955040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Classpectanon/pseuds/Classpectanon
Summary: The sunset from the tower was always the prettiest place on the island to watch, in Jade's opinion. It beat out almost every other sunset, except maybe the caldera, and pretty much nothing else. The way the light filtered into her room, golden as it was, painting everything in ethereal yellows and oranges and reds and maybe a couple of pinks or two, made her day instantly better.This was good, because her frustration with tuning her bass was rapidly making it much worse.24/365
Relationships: Jade Harley & Her Gibson Bass
Series: Three Hundred And Sixty Five Ficlets About Homestuck [24]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2085684
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	Jade Tunes Her Bass

The sunset from the tower was always the prettiest place on the island to watch, in Jade's opinion. It beat out almost every other sunset, except maybe the caldera, and pretty much nothing else. The way the light filtered into her room, golden as it was, painting everything in ethereal yellows and oranges and reds and maybe a couple of pinks or two, made her day instantly better.

This was good, because her frustration with tuning her bass was rapidly making it much worse.

Oh, it started simple enough. She hummed an "E" and assumed she knew what it sounded like, considering she had been playing bass for Bec-knows-how-long now (9 years, at the age of 7) - you would imagine this was more than enough time to know what a bass sounded like. Unfortunately, Jade was far too stubborn to get a tuner shipped from Amazon, didn't have enough time in the day to invent her own, and just plum unwilling to go look up a video where someone else played each note for her unless it was a pure 60 decibel sine wave, and right now her doggy ears were having a bit of a day and not really interested in that.

And then, once you tuned to the "E", it was a fairly simple job of just using the 5th fret of each string to continue all the way up to "A", "D", and "G", right? Unlike a guitar, Jade didn't have to do any math more complicated than counting out the fifth fret, and yet when she played her typical high-string practice (D3 - D4 - D3 - C4hD4 - D3 - D#4pD4 - D3 - C4hD4 - D3 - A#3hC4 ad nauseum, you should know this if you play bass, Jade's opinion, not mine, even though she's right), something sounded undoubtedly off. Her strings were rattling against the fretboard in a way that made her entire body wince with every little tiny microtone out of tune they were in. And every vibratory whack of the string against the fretboard just felt like it detuned it a little more.

If there was anything Jade hated more than tuning her bass (a Gibson EB in red that has serviced her for many, many years), it was replacing strings. Such delicate, finnicky work - she could handle a microscope just fine, but throw some bass strings in front of her and she's about as useful as a [insert not-useful thing here as part of the joke], oh she was too frustrated to even think of an unuseful thing to compare herself to.

She grabbed the knob on the E string and let out a little cathartic scream as she twisted it back and forth and back and forth and, hoping that maybe some percussive maintenance could "factory reset" her strings, perhaps, just tweaking them left and right and left and right until any memory of sour notes was scrubbed out of the flexible metal.

Back and forth and back and TWNNNGGGGG, as all four strings snapped _simultaneously_. Jade stared at her bass for a moment in an even mixture of confusion, disbelief, and fascination at the statistics behind such an event. True, she was rocking it back and forth rather violently as she tried to reset her E string, but all four strings, at once? An incredibly fascinating statistical improbab

WAIT, SHE'D HAVE TO REPLACE THEM

FUUUUUUUUCK

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. All views, kudos, comments, and bookmarks are appreciated.  
> [Twitter](https://twitter.com/classpectanon)


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